Back in November ‘07 our own John Lawless was interviewed on WFDU FM, which broadcasts in the New York City metro market. He was the guest of Carol Beaugard, host of WFDU’s Lonesome Pine RFD.

Carol also has an edition show that is carried by WAMU HD and Bluegrasscountry.org. She will be re-running her interview with John this week so if anyone missed it the first time, be sure to tune in.

John and Carol talked about his work with The Bluegrass Blog and AcuTab Publications, plus Acoustic Endeavors, with whom he plays banjo.

Catch John on Lonesome Pine RFD on Bluegrasscountry.org Tuesday morning (3/11) at 1:00 a.m. and again on Wednesday (3/13) at 10:00 p.m. (EDT)

Don’t forget that our own John Lawless will be interviewed this morning on the Lonesome Pine RFD show, carried on WFDU 89.1 FM.

The show broadcasts from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, and serves the New York City metro market. John will be on with WFDU’s Carol Beaugard and Steve Lutke at approximately 10:15 a.m. (EST) to discuss his activities in the bluegrass world - including, of course, The Bluegrass Blog.

If you live beyond the reach of the WFDU broadcast signal, you can catch the show live via audio streaming at www.wfdu.fm.

Lonesome Pine RFD is also aired as a rebroadcast on BluegrassCountry.org. Carol said that she would include John’s interview in an edition of her show there as well.

Your humble blogger will be a guest this coming Friday morning (11/30) on WFDU-FM, broadcast on 89.1 FM in the New York City metro market. I’ll join hosts Carol Beaugard and Steve Lutke at 10:15 a.m. (EST) to talk about The Bluegrass Blog and my other various bluegrass activities.

Steve is a fellow banjo picker, so Carol will have to ride herd to keep us from taking the whole discussion in a banjocentric direction.

I’m certainly looking foward to speaking with them on Friday, and hope that you can join us over the air, or online at www.wfdu.fm.

After 7 years of offering 3 day multi-instrument bluegrass seminars, Roanoke Bluegrass Weekend is calling it quits. Jointly hosted since November of 2002 by mandolin legend Herschel Sizemore and our own John Lawless, RBW has fallen prey to the many demands of John’s work with AcuTab, and Herschel’s retirement interests.

The event got its start in 1998 as an an all-banjo event, The AcuTab Banjo Seminar, which John hosted on his own. In 2000, Dan Miller, publisher of Flatpicking Guitar Magazine joined as co-host, and they added mandolin and guitar to the mix. During that period, they welcomed such esteemed artists as Sammy Shelor, Wayne Benson, David Grier and Chris Thile as instructors.

When Dan pulled out after two years, Herschel and John teamed up to continue operating the event, adding fiddle as well as bass, dobro and voice at various times since 2002. They were proud to see legends like Kenny Baker, Bobby Hicks, Roland White, Allen Shelton and Eddie Adcock as members of their faculty, plus younger “impact players” like Ron Stewart, Aubrey Haynie, Rob Ickes, Kenny Smith, Tim Stafford, Adam Steffey and Don Rigsby - just to name a few.

There is a statement from Herschel and John on the RBW web site about the event’s demise.

In all things, there comes a time to say goodbye, and so it is with our Roanoke Bluegrass Weekend. We both find our time stretched thin, and are unwilling to continue with this event absent our full attention and concentration. It has not been an easy decision, but we feel that it would be unfair to hold the weekend with so little time to dedicate to making it beneficial for the registrants.

Ultimately, it has been the students who have attended that have had the biggest impact on RBW, and we thank you all most particularly for supporting this event over the years. Your suggestions and feedback helped us to shape and modify RBW from one year to the next, and it was seeing your exhausted but beaming faces as things came to a close each year that kept us going when the time commitment seemed too severe.

Please don’t blame The Bluegrass Blog! John says that it is his other commitments and plans that have him in a time bind.

March 1, 2007 is the last date to take advantage of the early registration discount for the 2007 Smoky Mountain Banjo Academy. The event, held each spring near Gatlinburg, TN (hosted by Jack Hatfield), is scheduled this year from April 20-22. A $50 discount is offered for early registration.

Over the course of 3 days, more than 16 banjo instructors will conduct dozens of small classes and demonstrations, arranged by skill level, and offered for both old time and bluegrass banjo styles. There is also a faculty concert, a student banjo competition and plenty of organized and free-form jamming.

The faculty for SMBA ‘07 is rich with well known players and teachers: Eddie Adcock, Jason Bales, Dave Ball, Gary Davis, Janet Davis, Jack Hatfield, Bill Keith, Andy King, John Lawless, Randal Morton, James McKinney, Tom Nechville, Ken Perlman, Butch Robins, Rick Sampson and Snuffy Smith.

The name is apt, as everything takes place at the Wa-Floy Retreat, in the heart of The Smokies.

Find all the pertinent faculty, schedule and registration details on the SMBA web site.

Our own John Lawless will be teaching a banjo workshop in Raleigh, NC on March 24. It is hosted by Banjo In The Hollow, and will be held at the Community United Church of Christ from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The workshop is limited to 25 students, and John plans to cover a wide range of material.

John and I work together a couple of days a week, and though we are always working on music-related projects, we don’t usually interact musically. We never get to pick together, and I guess I forget sometimes that he can play the banjo - though he only admits to being “passing fair.”

There are audio samples of John’s CD, Five & Dime, on his web site, and in the iTunes Music Store. Ditto for his work with Acoustic Endeavors.

He also spent most of his career prior to establishing AcuTab Publications in 1994 as a banjo teacher, carrying as many as 30-40 students each week. He has started to accept private students again, on a limited basis, in Roanoke, VA.

John says that he hopes to do more workshops like this, now that he has a bit more time to dedicate to teaching, and asks that anyone with an interest in reaching him about that to contact him through his banjo lessons page on the AcuTab web site.

Find out more and get registrations details for the March 24 workshop in Raleigh at the Banjo In The Hollow site.

WNCW 88.7 FM in NC has posted the results of their online voting for the best releases of 2006. The results take the form of Top 100 Lists starting with a comprehensive list and then broken out into genre specific lists. The Bluegrass list is the better part of the way down the page. It contains only the top 50 releases in the bluegrass genre.

Our very own John Lawless appears on the list at #38. The release is On a Farm from the band of which he’s a part, Acoustic Endeavors.

Congrats John!

When we first got to Nashville on Monday afternoon, Brance and I were able to stop by the studios of XM Satellite Radio’s Bluegrass Junction at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and meet with host Kyle Cantrell. We have corresponded many times with Kyle, and enjoyed having a chance to meet face to face, and speak in person for the first time.

If you were tuned in to Bluegrass Junction on Monday afternoon, you may have heard us on XM with Kyle - a number of readers have written to say that they did. He was kind enough to play several tracks from the new Acoustic Endeavors CD, On A Farm, which he has featured a good bit on XM this year. Kyle also talked with Brance and I about The Bluegrass Blog, and prompted us to decribe the site and what we do here us to his listeners.

Thanks to Kyle and XM Nashville Executive Producer, Joyce Rizer, for their hospitality. See you guys next month at IBMA!

My fellow blog author, John Lawless, will be featured Sunday evening (3/12) on Sirius Satellite Radio’s bluegrass channel 65. He’ll be interviewed by Sirius on-air host Ned Luberecki, and they will also spin a number of tracks from John’s CD, Five & Dime. John will be in St. Louis (with Ned) teaching banjo classes at Bull & Tammy Harman’s St. Louis Flatpick.

Sirius subscribers can simply tune in on Channel 65, as can anyone with Dish Network Satellite TV where it will run on channel 6065. If you are a subscriber but won’t be in the car - or near your Sirius receiver - you can listen online. A free 3-day trial subscription is also available for online listening.

John and Ned’s segment will run in the 7:00 p.m. hour (EST) on Sunday, March 12.

St. Louis Flatpick is scheduled to run March 10-12, offering midwest guitar pickers - and now banjo players as well - a chance to study with some well known and highly qualified instructors. In addition to guitar instructors Tim May and Brad Davis, and banjo instructor Ned Luberecki, our own John Lawless will be on the faculty teaching banjo classes.

The event is hosted by Bull and Tammy Harman, who are excited to repeat the event again this year, and for the chance to expand into banjo as well as guitar. Bull tells us that the banjo class is a bit smaller than the guitar, as one might expect for the first year, so banjo students can expect a great deal of personal attention from the instructors.

Find more details on the St. Louis Flatpick web site.

After more than ten years creating and publishing celebrated instructional materials for intermediate and advanced level banjo players, AcuTab Publications is releasing the first three DVDs in their new Learn To Play Bluegrass Banjo series for folks just getting started with the banjo.

From the AcuTab site:

A recurring complaint we have heard from new players is that so many beginner books or videos try to cover too much material, too rapidly for the average inexperienced student to quickly absorb. The Learn To Play Bluegrass Banjo DVDs cover smaller amounts of information, but in a much more thorough manner - with careful, detailed explanations and lots of close up views of both hands.

Your humble blog authors are intimately involved in this project, as the Lessons in this AcuTab beginner banjo series series are taught by John Lawless, and they were all filmed and edited by yours truly at Clear Blue Productions. In addition to his work as a publisher and banjo player, John has long been recognized as a premier banjo instructor, and with the release of these first three DVD lessons, new banjo players everywhere can benefit from John’s thirty plus years of banjo teaching experience.

The DVDs will be ready by late December ‘05 - not in time for Christmas delivery, but perfectly timed for those folks who will begin their study of the banjo in earnest just after the holidays. AcuTab is accepting pre-orders now, and will ship as soon as the DVDs are available, on or near December 28. They will also be available from your favorite music store or online retailer at the end of the month.

AcuTab is offering a special “package price” for anyone ordering the first three DVDs in this series together - $75 for all three, as opposed to $30 each.

After almost three years of promises, the new release from Acoustic Endeavors is finally available. Like their two previous CDs, On A Farm contains all original material, written by Warren Amberson and Kelly Green, the band’s primary vocalists. Other band members include Dewey Peters on guitar, Billy Hurt on fiddle, plus one of our blog authors, John Lawless on banjo.

The material is a mix of bluegrass, gospel and folk-inflected acoustic music performed in a straighforward, unassuming manner. Audio samples are available on the Acoustic Endeavors web site.

The band asked us to mention that radio promos will go out next week (10/24) and that John will have copies with him at IBMA - find him at the AcuTab booth.

Following up on the critical success of their Team Flathead CD, Huber Banjos is set to release a second volume of recordings featuring popular bluegrass pickers on new Huber Banjos. Where Team Flathead focused on the banjos themselves, with each Huber model being featured on at least one track, Cuppa ‘Jo is more centered on a group of seven pro pickers who use a Huber to practice their craft.

This time out, Huber is featuring Jason Burleson (Blue Highway), Greg Cahill (Special Consensus), Cia Cherryholmes (Cherryholmes), Joey Cox (BlueRidge), Jason Davis (Kenny & Amanda Smith), Steve Dilling (IIIrd Tyme Out) and Jim Mills (Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder). Each player picks two tunes of their choosing, using their own personal Huber banjo.

The official release date is set for October 24, to coincide with the start of the IBMA World Of Bluegrass convention in Nashville, TN. Copies will be available on site from Huber Banjos, or pre-release orders can be placed with AcuTab to be shipped that week.

Audio samples are available on the AcuTab site as well.

Your blog authors were heavily involved in this recording, being produced by John Lawless of AcuTab and recorded by Brance Gillihan at Clear Blue Productions.

As of September 1, 2005, AcuTab will no longer function as the marketing and promotional arm of Huber Banjos, nor the sole source for ordering and customer service. This exclusive relationship which has existed since Huber Banjos launched in 2001 has served both companies well, but changes in future plans for both both AcuTab and Huber have suggested the need for Huber to bring all marketing and promotional efforts in house.

AcuTab will continue to carry Huber Banjo accessories and may resume offering Huber Banjos on a non-exclusive basis at some point in the future when Huber production is better able to keep pace with the growing demand for these fine banjos.

More details about this changeover can be found on the AcuTab web site.